Five thousand miles from the shores of southern France, a small sign stands on a beach in Mississippi.

The marker is titled “civil rights wade-ins” and gives a mild and bloodless description ofviolence on the sand. “On April 24, 1960,” it reads, “several citizens, both white and black, were injured and arrested including the leader of the wade-ins, Dr Gilbert Mason Sr.”

It was the most violent race-related clash in Mississippi’s history, a protest to desegregate Biloxi’s beaches. Survivors called it the “bloody wade-in” and except for the small marker, it is almost forgotten now. But those few people who survived it felt a sting of recognition recently, when they learned of France’s crackdown on Muslim women wearing conservative clothing on its beaches.

“I heard about that,” said Gwendolyn Mason, 75, who was a teenager at the time of the Biloxi protests. She clucked her tongue. “These French women have the right to be there like anyone else. The beach is a human right. It’s a human place.”

Dozens of towns along the coast have banned the burkini, which looks somewhat like a wetsuit with a long tunic and head covering, designed by an Australian Muslim woman. The garment remained relatively uncontroversial, until the recent contretemps in France.

A woman wears a burkini swimsuit on the beach. Photograph: Mohamed Messara/EPA

On Friday, France’s highest court overturned the ban in one town. But the country’s most prominent politicians have pledged to reinstate it, even if it requires changing the constitution.

Beaches, in France or Mississippi, bring people to the edge of human existence.

Beyond lies the vast, uninhabitable sea, revealing the species as small and temporary. There is no farther place to run, so on continents around the globe people congregate on shores and gaze into the horizon.

“It’s like a mountaintop in a way,” said Professor James Patterson Smith, who researches the coast at the University of Southern Mississippi. “It’s a place that provides perspective.”

There’s also vulnerability in wearing clothes that would seem out of place at a restaurant, library or church. The history of swimwear shows it’s a fickle thing, depending on where a bather entered the water, and in what era.

In fourth-century Sicily, women wore bikinis according to ancient mosaics. In the 19th century, western women wore canvas “swimming gowns” that reached their ankles and ballooned full of air when they entered the water, so they moved atop the waves like water-borne zeppelins, all femininity obscured.

Swimsuits probably reached maximum skin exposure – peak peek – in the 1980s, when Austrian-American designer Rudi Gernreich created the topless “monokini” and the even less-there “pubikini”. He designed the suits as a reaction against the west’s expectations that women should cover themselves; rather they should feel free to choose.

His 1985 manifesto still subverts the norm in France: “I couldn’t help feel the implicit hypocrisy that made something in one culture immoral and in another perfectly acceptable.”

All this dressing and undressing, according to Smith, left beachgoers feeling stimulated and perturbed.

“It sexualized the beach,” he said. “And that left us highly sensitive to ‘the other’.”

At the beach, he said, we gaze both outward and inward.

‘Which bodies can be held in bondage’

In the southern United States, dark-skinned people on the beach represented racial chaos, wherein black people could dilute a social order built on color.

“The main question of the day was which bodies could be held in bondage,” Smith said. “So a person of mixed background threatened that entire system.”

There are enormous differences between modern France and mid-century Mississippi. But they did have one thing in common: a crisis of identity.

And for that, in Mississippi, people would die.

Gwendolyn Mason remembers days in Biloxi when her neighbor would take her and her friends to the beach. They were small.

“He was a black man, but he looked white,” she said.

At the beach he would set up a chair and read a newspaper, watching over the children. As cars passed on the beach road, drivers would lean into their horns, blaring. The neighbor would calmly say, “You never mind that. Just go ahead and play.”

As a teenager Gwendolyn watched a young doctor, Gilbert Mason – whom she would later marry – lead a series of “wade-ins” to protest at Biloxi’s segregated beaches. He was an educated man, a visionary and a close friend of soon-to-be martyred Medgar Evers. Only years later, Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders would march in Alabama.

The first wade-in drew just a few attendees. Police pushed them down the beach, toward the narrow strip for black people. Officers told them that the other 26 miles were for “only the public”.

At the second wade-in, Gilbert came alone. This time police arrested him.

Gilbert held great standing as Biloxi’s only black doctor, practicing from his home. He pulled teeth, delivered babies and performed surgery for the black community. So when police arrested him, his friends took action.

On 24 April 1960, 125 black people walked down on to the white sand and proceeded to play games, lie in the sun and gaze – like all other humans – into the vastness of the sea.

Before long, white vigilantes showed up with clubs, chains and tire irons. Police stood aside and watched while the group attacked and beat the protesters, leaving them bloodied and broken. The melee continued throughout the weekend, and two black people died as white mobs moved through black neighborhoods.

Eventually, in 1968, black people won the right to visit public beaches.

Gilbert Mason also won the right to practice medicine in the local hospital, after 15 years.

But it took all those years, his widow said, for people to accept change.

A young black woman named Erin Brewer recently visited the Biloxi beach at the site of the wade-in.

She hadn’t heard about it before.

She walked past the historical marker, with its brief summary, and read it. Then she read it again, and again. “It’s a strange feeling,” she said. “I feel grateful.”

She had heard about the affair of the French Muslim women and their clothes. She held out her own long skirt, which flapped in the breeze. “I’m a Christian,” she said. “But people should be allowed to believe what they believe. How can you change a person’s beliefs by forcing them to take off their clothes? It’s impossible.”